The Pigeon House

Mr Thomas Balston bequeathed to the Art Fund a large collection of pictures, drawings, and prints, with the request that his extensive collection of works by, after, and connected with John Martin (on whom he had written a monograph) should be offered to the Victoria and Albert Museum, that the Ashmolean Museum should be allowed to take what it wanted of the rest, and that the residue should, so far as possible, be distributed among other public institutions in Great Britain.

Renoir's La Place Clichy presents a charming and apparently spontaneous impression of Parisian life. It is easy to see from this picture why one commentator described the artist as 'the true painter of young women, the bloom of whose skin, velvet flesh, darting eye, and elegant finery, he renders with sunlit gaiety.'

The 14th-century Macclesfield Psalter contains delightfully surreal marginal illustrations, including a dog dressed as a bishop, a rabbit riding a hound, and a series of grotesque figures with faces in their bottoms and legs emerging from their shoulders.